Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with the Slate, spoiler special on Harry Potter 7, also known as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1.

Joining me from our Slate DC Studios is Dan Koyce.

Hi, Dan.

Hi, Dana.

And Dan, as we know, is Washington Post movie critic, a contributor to Slate, contributor to Vulture magazine, all around Bon Vivant,

and my Harry Potter go-to source because you are, can you give me some of your background here,

give you your cred on Harry Potter?

Well, I wrote all seven of the novels, and I took time out for my busy schedule of setting piles

of buddy on fire to come in here to talk to you.

No, I, you know, I'm a big Harry Potter fan.

With Deathly Hallows in particular, I was excited to see this movie because several years ago when the book came out, when Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows, the seventh book came out.

In the summer of 2007, I wrote for Slate, alongside a bunch of other great people, a Slate book club, a spoiler book club about the Deathly Hallows in which, you know, the book came out on Friday and the Monday after the book came out.

Me and a couple of other writers talked, did it basically a spoiler special book club of the book over the first week.

So you read the 700 page book over a weekend?

Yes.

We sent our daughter away to her grandparents' house for the weekend and bought two copies of the book and spent.

This was the first weekend we had had, my wife and I had by ourselves since our daughter had been born, and we spent it both reading her.

Which, of course, now that your daughters are older, you're going to have to read all the way through again with them.

Oh, well, luckily, I basically know it by heart, so I won't necessarily even need the books.

But, yeah, so I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter books.

I've been a increasing fan of the Harry Potter movies as they have gotten better along

the way leading up to this one, which we can call Harry Potter 7A.

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